The Giants will never play a normal series against the Marlins, those Miami darlings. They’re a quirky team, from the aquaria to the home run monstrosity, to Logan Morrison’s twitter avatar[1].

And then there’s Giancarlo Stanton, who reminds me of how terrified I was of Kyle Blanks, if Kyle Blanks ever actually managed to stay healthy. Stanton is a beast of a man, who the Marlins drafted in the second round of the 2007 draft. The Giants drafted Madison Bumgarner that year, who has worked out pretty well, and Tim Alderson, who the Giants traded away to get Freddy Sanchez. So would you really rather have Stanton than Sanchez? Wait, don’t answer that.

After getting a profound whoopin’ the last time the Giants played the Marlins, I’m happy for a series split here. Something about the Marlins’ colors that are so distracting. They wore dark orange uniforms today, and I had one of those “oh yeah, they have orange in their color scheme too” realizations. John Buck wore a catcher’s mask[2] that looks like a rainbow clown wig[3], and Tim Lincecum wore a hat that made him pitch like Todd Wellemeyer on a bad day. But this was a nice game to win to get some momentum going into the Arizona series at home.

This series showed us nothing more than the fact that the Giants can psych themselves up and score some runs, especially when we can lull opposing players to sleep with a glass of hot Melk. He got 4 hits today with a homer and two steals, and is currently on pace for a whole crap-load of hits. Let’s talk extension in a few months, but not right now.

Brandon Watch 2012:

Crawford: Good defense, no hits. Whatevs.

Belt: The Saga of Brandon Belt is such a strange and sordid tale. Scott Ostler reported that the Giants are “systematically spreading the word on Brandon Belt” that “his swing plane is faulty, his stance is bad, he’s stubborn.” Ostler seems to conclude that the FO is doing this in a deliberate effort to temper fans’ expectations of Belt and take some pressure off the team to play him every day. Then today, MLB.com [4]quoted Bochy saying “I like where he’s at right now. [Belt] likes where he’s at too…” I’m so confused. He hasn’t looked great at the plate recently, but there really isn’t much else. Huff is not the answer, and Pill has looked less than fantastic.